The invention concerns a process for identifying processes, preferably telecommunications processes, as well as their resources, each of which is provided with a (first) identifier unambiguously identifying this process, and further concerns a suitable computer, program or software module for implementing this process, as well as a switching centre having such a module.
Such a process has been disclosed by U.S. Pat. No. 5,644,719, for example.
With quasi-simultaneous processing of several processes with a computer (multitasking) the processing of processes in a computer is nested or interleaved chronologically by an appropriate process controlled by an operating system, so that the processing is effected in a quasi-simultaneous manner. To do this, each process receives a so-called process identifier (PID), that is assigned only once in the system and therefore unambiguously identifies the process. Resources such as, for example, stacks or memory location, that are made available to a process by the operating system, or even data, are provided with the respective process identifier in order to identify their allocation to the respective process. If a process is terminated, the memory location, for example, in which data of the terminated process are stored, is freed by using the identifier.
If a process is aborted prematurely, that is to say not terminated normally, because an error has occurred, for example, a new process is started that is intended to replace this abnormally terminated process. Of course, the new process which receives a new process identifier cannot access the data of the aborted process, since these are identified by the process identifier of the terminated process. If one of several mutually coupled processes is prematurely terminated, the new process continuing this process must be synchronised to the remaining processes in a complicated manner. And if a process does not run for a prolonged period of time it cannot be terminated since, otherwise, access to its data is no longer possible at a later time. This leads to a high requirement for storage space and consequently for the resources to be provided.
In the case of the nested computers described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,644,719, the operating system also allocates process identifiers (PID) to application processes that are handled by the computer, these process identifiers being used by the operating system during the transmission of messages between the processes.